In this well-known old song, an English canon composed by John Hilton in 1652, we are encouraged to follow an invisible leader. But before we decide to do so, we ask him "whither shall I follow? Whither shall I follow thee?" The answer sounds tempting: "to the greenwood tree..." So,... off we go!... Or perhaps not?

Bion's Theory of Thinking -- "Container-Contained"

The theory or the "model" at the base of author's reflections is Bion's model "container-contained", also called his "theory of thinking". The relationship between container and contained is central to Bion's thinking seeing it as basic, a ubiquitous pattern of relationships which, as it were, biologically pre-programmed. In other words, it is one of nature's key patterns. It is at one and the same time: the model of conception (penis-in-vagina), gestation (embryo-in-uterus), alimentation (nipple-in-mouth) and elimination (faeces-in-colon).

I highlighted the part of the post I am not sure it's coherent with the rest - anyone cares to explain a bit?

colo, I guess it means that people find it difficult to organize in that-ideal-form-of-social-rule and that not rarely they give consent to be ruled by people who just have the courage to go ahead and lead (rule) others the way they will. It may not be the best/worst way possible, it may be close (enough), but who knows/will ever know?!

Not to mention that old sayin' "Old men start wars and young men fight them!"

But of course - these are the kinds of nihilistic killers - there is a movie "Mr. Brooks" which depicts a guy who killed people for the hell of it..

Examining his modus operandi, from the fastidious preparation and cleaning up of the crime scene before departing, it looks like Brooks was obsessed with not getting caught (he responds to Smith's inquiry as to whether the person they would agree on killing could be someone who he knew, by saying, that you never kill someone you know, that's the surest way to get caught) - and yet, as Smith lies dying, Brooks reveals that he used many different MOs before becoming the meticulous Thumbprint Killer.

Serial offenders modify and perfect their MO as they become more adept at what they do. The improvement or slight adjustment to an offender's MO is something for investigators to bear in mind in analyzing a criminal pattern over time and formulating a behavioral profile. This is especially true in the first stages of profiling when the investigator begins his or her profile from the paradigm of the Organized/Disorganized continuum.

L Liberty, how about copy-cat crimes - offenders that copy the MO/signature of other offenders reported in the media or described in fiction?

A quaint story of an obscure primitive village existing long before our times? Could this unsophisticated money system possibly have anything in common with our modern technical society? Believe it or not, this allegory represents all of the basic elements of our modern money. Of course we do not use gold, but gold is usually the only solution offered as the logical recourse for the current system, while all fingers point damningly at our fiat currency (money that does not have a value of its own). As you can see such a solution is bogus disinformation designed to mislead those that question the system. All are careful never to mention the true value of money, which is labor. Yes we do have a fiat money system, but the creation and distribution of our fiat money is corrupt, and works just the same as the gold coins in the preceding allegory. Just as the gold coins were created and loaned out by the alchemist, our money is created and loaned into circulation by the Federal Reserve, as if it already had value.

The truth is, this money is worthless just as the wooden coins where worthless until after they were worked for. Because the powers that be have convinced us that our fiat money somehow has a magical value of its own (just because they say it does) and they alone have acquired the power to create and distribute it, they can easily manipulate its value. The village council represents our Federal Government, which has become corrupt, bought and paid for by those that control our money. The group of wealthy business men represents our monopoly corporations, that work hand and glove with our corrupt government and the money masters. And the Baker represents what could happen if the word ever got out to enough people regarding the esoteric secrets of money, and how it is used as a tool to steal our labor, and make us all into their willing slaves.

An interesting post from the other thread this one.

Well, the gold standard is a monetary system in which the standard economic unit of account is a fixed weight of gold. There are distinct kinds of gold standard. First, the gold specie standard is a system in which the monetary unit is associated with circulating gold coins, or with the unit of value defined in terms of one particular circulating gold coin in conjunction with subsidiary coinage made from a lesser valuable metal.

Similarly, the gold exchange standard typically involves the circulation of only coins made of silver or other metals, but where the authorities guarantee a fixed exchange rate with another country that is on the gold standard. This creates a de facto gold standard, in that the value of the silver coins has a fixed external value in terms of gold that is independent of the inherent silver value. Finally, the gold bullion standard is a system in which gold coins do not circulate, but in which the authorities have agreed to sell gold bullion on demand at a fixed price in exchange for the circulating currency.

No country currently uses the gold standard as the basis of their monetary system, although several hold substantial gold reserves.

Commodity money is inconvenient to store and transport. Further, it does not allow a government to manipulate or restrict the flow of commerce within its dominion with the same ease that a fiat currency does. As such, commodity money gave way to representative money, and gold and other specie were retained as its backing. Gold was a common form of money due to its rarity, durability, divisibility, fungibility, and ease of identification, often in conjunction with silver. Silver was typically the main circulating medium, with gold as the metal of monetary reserve.

The gold standard variously specified how the gold backing would be implemented, including the amount of specie per currency unit. The currency itself is just paper and so has no intrinsic value, but is accepted by traders because it can be redeemed any time for the equivalent specie. A U.S. silver certificate, for example, could be redeemed for an actual piece of silver.

Representative money and the gold standard protect citizens from hyperinflation and other abuses of monetary policy, as were seen in some countries during the Great Depression. However, they were not without their problems and critics, and so were partially abandoned via the international adoption of the Bretton Woods System. That system eventually collapsed in 1971, at which time nearly all nations had switched to full fiat money.

Mental breakdown is all too common during times of war, anarchy and turmoil. I remember when I was once in Africa people were suffering from all kinds of stress-related disorders when all of a sudden there was no rule of law, with the State not functioning at all. The country descended in anarchy and violence, the goverment was toppled and some 2,000 people were killed. The entire country fell under the control of rebels and criminal gangs.

Guns became available to just about anyone, with fears on the part of people that old scores were going to be settled. In fact, rebels took even control of 19 combat aircraft type "MiG," let alone military vehicles and tanks.

B Ashton, where you've been? I mean, MiGs, military vehicles and tanks?!

Serial offenders modify and perfect their MO as they become more adept at what they do. The improvement or slight adjustment to an offender's MO is something for investigators to bear in mind in analyzing a criminal pattern over time and formulating a behavioral profile. This is especially true in the first stages of profiling when the investigator begins his or her profile from the paradigm of the Organized/Disorganized continuum.

L Liberty, how about copy-cat crimes - offenders that copy the MO/signature of other offenders reported in the media or described in fiction?

What exactly is the "signature" thing you mention, pick?

Looks like the signature has to do with what the offender does to satisfy his psychological needs in committing the crime (acts committed that are not necessary to complete the offense, characteristic to the specific offender) - that kind of explains the "why" also, as opposed to only "how" the crime was committed. But in real world, terms like these are taken with a grain of slat, truth-be-told.

Listen - we know they use this IQ thing based on the Bell Curve and the like - but we all also know it's not that law schools, for example, really believe that LSAT is such a reliable entrance criteria they use (not the only they use, btw) - they just use it!

And please don't gimme that * & ^ % -

"If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, looks like a duck, it must be a duck."

My apologies for inserting this post on this thread, but these are the conditions we've to get used to,

Me too, would not be so concerned about the IQ thing, I mean, there are so many areas in which you can showcase yourself, should you have been accepted by the low school with not-so-good LSAT sore .

Take for instance, the Rorschach test. Its inkblots are purportedly ambiguous, structureless entities which are to be given a clear structure by the interpreter. Like all projective tests, the Rorschach presents viewers with ambiguous images and asks them to interpret the images, thereby eliciting their thoughts, fears, motives, and fantasies. The 10 symmetrical inkblots used in the test (5 contain color, 5 are black and gray) are always the same, given in a specific order, and are supposed to be kept secret from the public to ensure "spontaneous" answers that give clues to people's personalities – and personality disorders. The Rorschach originally came under fire in the 1950s and '60s because it lacked standardized procedures for its administration and scoring.

[...] Projective tests like the Rorschach, the TAT (Thematic Apperception Test), which features cards with drawings of ambiguous situations, mostly featuring people, and the Draw-A-Person (clients are asked to draw a person of the same sex and the opposite sex) can take hours to administer and score, and rely heavily on examiner interpretation and, in some part, intuition. [...] Perhaps the Rorschach test can, as claimed, provide an "X-ray of the mind." But, asks Lilienfeld, whose mind: that of the client or the examiner?

TITCR!

You hit the nail on the @ # ! * i n g head, charisma!

That's exactly the problem: the ambiguity of the inkblot, the fact that the same picture can be interpreted both ways, so to speak, "positively," and "negatively" - with these latter terms being relative, because what's considered "positive/relatively positive" for case (interpreter) #1, based on his/her own intuition/experience, may be the "negative/relative negative" of case (interpreter) #2, again, based on her/his intuition/experience

Of course, it would be nice if one would get the opinions of more than one interpreter, get like 2, or even more, in order to come to a better conclusion (something which in practice does not really happen, but we are talking what it would be happen in a perfect world, so to speak, again

For the sake of truth, the Rorschach inkblots are so ugly that there's no way one can come up with some flowery description of them. No wonder why it tends to over-pathologize. Standardizing the "test" won't help, for obvious reasons.

Serial offenders modify and perfect their MO as they become more adept at what they do. The improvement or slight adjustment to an offender's MO is something for investigators to bear in mind in analyzing a criminal pattern over time and formulating a behavioral profile. This is especially true in the first stages of profiling when the investigator begins his or her profile from the paradigm of the Organized/Disorganized continuum.

L Liberty, how about copy-cat crimes - offenders that copy the MO/signature of other offenders reported in the media or described in fiction?

What exactly is the "signature" thing you mention, pick?

Looks like the signature has to do with what the offender does to satisfy his psychological needs in committing the crime (acts committed that are not necessary to complete the offense, characteristic to the specific offender) - that kind of explains the "why" also, as opposed to only "how" the crime was committed. But in real world, terms like these are taken with a grain of slat, truth-be-told.

Tahiri - I have a feeling that that's not exactly the kind of thing that Dhorothea is asking "pick" about!

Many pyramids are more sophisticated than the simple model. These recognize that recruiting a large number of others into a scheme can be difficult so a seemingly simpler model is used. In this model each person must recruit two others, but the ease of achieving this is offset because the depth required to recoup any money also increases. The scheme requires a person to recruit two others, who must each recruit two others, who must each recruit two others.

The "8-ball" model contains a total of 15 members. Note that unlike in the picture, the triangular setup in the cue game of eight-ball corresponds to an arithmetic progression 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 = 15. The pyramid scheme in the picture in contrast is a geometric progression 1 + 2 + 4 + 8 = 15.

Prior instances of this scam have been called the "Airplane Game" and the four tiers labelled as "captain", "co-pilot", "crew", and "passenger" to denote a person's level. Such schemes may try to downplay their pyramid nature by referring to themselves as "gifting circles" with money being "gifted". Popular scams such as the "Women Empowering Women" do exactly this. Joiners may even be told that "gifting" is a way to skirt around tax laws.

Whichever euphemism is used, there are 15 total people in four tiers (1 + 2 + 4 + 8 ) in the scheme - the person at the top of this tree is the "captain", the two below are "co-pilots", the four below are "crew" and the bottom eight joiners are the "passengers". The eight passengers must each pay (or "gift") a sum (e.g. $1000) to join the scheme. This sum (e.g. $8000) goes to the captain who leaves, with everyone remaining moving up one tier. There are now two new captains so the group splits in two with each group requiring eight new passengers. A person who joins the scheme as a passenger will not see a return until they exit the scheme as a captain. This requires that 14 others have been persuaded to join underneath them. Therefore, the bottom 3 tiers of the pyramid always lose their money when the scheme finally collapses.

No matter how large the model becomes before collapse, approximately 88% of all people will lose.

If the scheme collapses at this point, only those in the 1, 2, 4, and 8 got out with a return. The remainder in the 16, 32, and 64 tier lose everything. 112 out of the total 127 members or 88% lost all of their money. During a wave of pyramid activity, a surge frequently develops once a significant fraction of people know someone personally who exited with a $8000 payout for example. This spurs others to seek to get in on one of the many pyramids before the wave collapses. The figures also hide the fact that the confidence trickster would make the lion's share of the money. They would do this by filling in the first 3 tiers (with 1, 2, and 4 people) with phoney names, ensuring they get the first 7 payouts, at 8 times the buy-in sum, without paying a single penny themselves. So if the buy-in were $1000, they would receive $56,000, paid for by the first 56 investors. They would continue to buy in underneath the real investors, and promote and prolong the scheme for as long as possible in order to allow them to skim even more from it before the collapse.

Other cons may also be effective. For example, rather than using fake names, a group of 7 people may agree to form the top 3 layers of a pyramid without investing any money. They then work to recruit 8 paying passengers, and pretend to follow the pyramid payout rules, but in reality split any money received. Ironically, though they are being conned, the 8 paying passengers are not really getting anything less for their money than if they were buying into a 'legitimate' pyramid which had split off from a parent pyramid. They truly are now in a valid pyramid, and have the same opportunity to earn a windfall if they can successfully recruit enough new members and reach captain. This highlights the fact that by 'buying' in to a pyramid, passengers are not really obtaining anything of value they couldn't create themselves other than a vague sense of "legitimacy" or history of the pyramid, which may make it marginally easier to sell passenger seats below them.

Pyramidal schemes are cult-like environments, with those on the top being those who do nothing but lie and win, and the further down you go the more suckers, who lose everything, you find ...

What I wanted to point out, though, is that the hierarchical structure that the current social order entails can well be likened to a pyramidal scheme.

Easier said than done, L Liberti, thou, as Will You Walk, points out after that post - and as these other posts by Just Say No demonstrate:

Quote

In massive scams, such as pyramid schemes or Ponzi schemes that involved thousands, perhaps millions of people, believers tend to congregate, and start their own 'support groups', where they start to reinforce each-other's beliefs. With advent of electronic communication, meetings can be held virtually via web forums (i.e. electronic bulletin boards), communication clients such as Internet chat clients, blogs, websites, and so on.

When large groups congregate, some people will dominate through sheer force of personality, even online, and those became the leaders. The result is a "cult of personality." This may or may not be encouraged by the scheme itself, but it certainly will not be discouraged.

Following is a list of signs of a cult:

- Thinking in black and white terms- Using a new language/cultic jargon (coded language)- Saying goodbye to all old friends and only seeing people affiliated with, or not critical of the cult- Creating distance from family, especially during holidays and family events- Euphoric, yet simultaneously tired and worn- Humorless- A change in diet and sleep patterns- Low on money- A dismissal of their life prior to involvement with the group as "all bad"- A change in goals, priorities, and life plan- Return to child-like behavior- Dogmatic adherence to new beliefs/ideas, with the inability, or lack of interest to logically assess these new beliefs- Secrecy

Scheme believers exhibit many of the signs listed above. Scam victims (i.e. scheme believers) are known to abandon friends and family, esp. those who are critical of the scam. They don't want to question the beliefs of the scam:, which is simply, "X is great, X will pay me. (Death to all opponents of X) " They sometimes even give themselves a new group name to increase their group identity (encouraged by the scam).

Will you walk, the CD Theory is all too complex to fully explain it here - I'd focus instead on the practical applications of the Dissonance Theory. That's because one of the reasons it has inspired much research is its ability to explain phenomena not readily explainable by common sense. For instance, dissonance theory has been used as a way to understand events that totally confound our imagination - like the enormous power certain cult leaders like Jim Jones, David Koresh, and Marshall Herff Applewhite have had over the hearts and minds of their followers.

Take for instance Jim Jones. It goes without saying that the massacre at Jonestown was tragic in the extreme. It is beyond comprehension that a single person could make hundreds of people kill themselves and their own children.

"Jim" Jones was the founder and leader of the "Peoples Temple," best known for the Nov 18, 1978 mass suicide of 909 Temple members in Jonestown, Guyana, along with the killings of 5 other people at a nearby airstrip. Over 200 children were murdered at Jonestown, almost all of whom were forcefully made to ingest cyanide by the elite Temple members. Jones was born in Indiana and started the Temple in that state in the 1950s. Jones and the Temple later moved to California, and both gained notoriety with the move of the Temple's headquarters to San Francisco in the mid-1970s. The incident in Guyana ranks among the largest mass suicides in history, and was the single greatest loss of American civilian life in a non-natural disaster until the events of Sep 11, 2001.

Now you may have heard about the all-too-familiar technique of the foot-in-the-door. Escalation is perpetuating. Once a small commitment is made, it sets the stage for ever-increasing commitments. The behavior needs to be justified, so attitudes are changed; this change in attitudes influences future decisions and behavior. Suppose you would like to enlist someone's aid in a massive undertaking, but you know the job you have in mind for the person is so difficult, and will require so much time and effort, that the person will surely decline. What do you do? You may get the person involved in much smaller aspects of the job, ones so easy that s/he wouldn't dream of turning down. Such serves to commit the individual to the "cause." Once people are thus committed, the likelihood of their complying with the larger request increases.

Jim Jones extracted great trust from his followers one step at a time. There was a chain of ever-increasing commitments on the part of his followers. Once a small commitment is made, the stage is set for ever-increasing commitments. It's easy to understand how a charismatic leader like Jones might extract money from his church's members. Once they have committed themselves to donating a small amount in response to his message of peace and universal brotherhood, he's able to request and receive a great deal more. Next, he induces people to sell their homes and turn over the money to the church. Soon, at his request, several of his followers pull up stakes, leaving their families and friends, to start life anew in the strange and difficult environment of Guyana. There, not only do they work hard (thus increasing their commitment), but they also are cut off from potential dissenting opinion, inasmuch as they are surrounded by true believers.

Jones takes sexual liberties with several married women among his followers, who acquiesce, but reluctantly; Jones claims to be the father of their children. He had sexual relations with his men followers as well, and made them believe they were all homosexuals, while he was the only heterosexual. Finally, as a prelude to the climactic event, Jones induces his followers to perform a series of mock ritual suicides as a test of their loyalty and obedience. Thus, in a step-by-step fashion, the commitment to Jones increases. Each step in itself is not a huge, ludicrous leap from the one preceding it.